MOTIVATION

The TWON project aims to produce evidence-based recommendations for regulatory innovation in relation to online social networks and to strengthen digital citizenship through participatory methods.

At the end of the project, the aim is to present the European Commission with corresponding strategic recommendations for regulations of technology companies or platform operators.

GOALS AND APPROACH

The overall goal of the research project is to propose, build and analyze data from a digital twin of online social networks (OSNs) and thereby to identify and understand the impact of OSN platform mechanisms such as content filtering or personalization on democratic debates.

The project has several goals:

Goal 1: Creating a digital twin: designing and replicating OSN mechanisms to show the impact of OSNs on democratic debates.

Goal 2. Simulate democratic debates: Test the resilience of democratic debates through case studies based on different issues (e.g. Ukraine war, COVID-19 pandemic).

Goal 3. Measuring the quality of democratic debates: Through a metric developed specifically for TWON, researchers will examine the extent to which the quality of democratic debates changes.

Procedure:

1. the first half-year represents the "design phase": The goal is to collect data, identify network parameters, establish assumptions, and define benchmarks for "constructive political debates."

2. in the second half of the year, the "replication phase" is carried out: Attempts are made to replicate a real social network in order to generate behavior and content that is as similar as possible to actual observations.

3. the third half-year is the "generation phase": an attempt is made to abstract and extrapolate networks that produce behaviors that are more desirable in terms of successful policy debates. This phase also includes the interpretation of generated patterns.

All three steps will be repeated again over the course of the three years to improve the original design and assumptions made, as well as to add further functionalities.

INNOVATIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

TWON is the first EU-funded project to design and implement a digital twin of social networks to answer interdisciplinary questions about the effects of digital spaces on the culture of democratic debate.